


Pray Till I Go Blind

by el_em_en_oh_pee



Series: i feel god in this kentucky tonight [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Religious, Appalachia, Blasphemy, Church Sex, Demon Harry Styles, Homophobia, M/M, PLEASE READ THE ADDITIONAL WARNINGS, Past Zayn Malik/Louis Tomlinson, Pastor Louis Tomlinson, Power Imbalance, Religion, Religion Kink, Religious Guilt, The South
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 04:28:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2137014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/el_em_en_oh_pee/pseuds/el_em_en_oh_pee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is (kind of) a preacher. Harry is (probably) a demon. Of course, nothing's as simple as that. </p><p>This is not a love story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pray Till I Go Blind

**Author's Note:**

> ten thousand pounds of thanks go to: [kim](http://winterssmolder.tumblr.com) for the handholding, [cait](http://berryswiftly.tumblr.com) for the beta, and [wade](http://seancodydirection.tumblr.com) for the encouragement and for organizing this fest! this wouldn't exist without you guys. all remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
>  
> 
> **WARNING FOR** : generally: homophobia, specifically equating non-heterosexual sex with sin; mentions of getting kicked out of a house for being non-heterosexual; mentions of drugs and drug abuse (not of any speaking characters); very brief mentions of drug-related homicide; background/nonspeaking character death. BASICALLY this is set in ultrareligious small-town eastern kentucky, so….. either you know what that means or you don't, but most warnings are part and parcel of that.  
>  **sex scene specific** : blasphemous sex in a church, including use of scripture verses during sex; religious/blasphemous kink; pain kink (including indirect burning/branding/scarification); and while the kinks aren't _disliked_ by the characters involved, there is absolutely no kink negotiation. further, by nature of Harry being a demon whose main goal is seduction, **this could read as coerced consent**. proceed with caution.

The church is more of a clapboard shack than it is a proper church. There's a window unit that churns out noise and a disgusting musty smell more than it cools the air, and it's making an abortive and altogether reluctant attempt at reducing the humidity by the door. The pulpit is nice enough, for cheap material, but the resin stain on the pews is tacky to the touch. 

But there's a single room in the back where Louis can put a bed, and the town is small enough that the lack of space in the sanctuary won't be an issue. 

"A farce of a church for a farce of a preacher," Louis murmurs, knocking his knuckles against the cross nailed to the near-makeshift altar. He'd feel more discouraged about the space if he hadn't fabricated most of his credentials. The pay is good, even in a town like this. He needed money quick, and the old preacher left in a rush after some kind of huge scandal. Louis had been practicing sermons in Pullen Park, renting the shittiest hotel room in Raleigh, before an old friend he'd never thought he'd hear from again texted him about this opportunity. 

For a desperate parish, they certainly didn't investigate him very closely.

He pushes the door to the room in the back open. The air is cloyingly thick and dusty in here, and hotter. There's a tiny kitchenette in one corner, and a bathroom just off that. There's barely room for a dresser and a bed - not that Louis has either - in the rest of the space. He suspects the last preacher had a house, and used this for meetings, but Louis is never going to turn down free rent.

He dumps his duffel bag on the floor and goes to the tiny window in the corner, pushing it open to try and get some of the air to circulate in the complete lack of breeze. Slumping against the wall, he pulls his wallet out of his pocket and thumbs through what little cash he has left.

Just enough for the shittiest air mattress at the Walmart and some cans of soup. He'll have to organize a church potluck picnic soon, get some leftovers from that. He can probably bum some packing crates off of one of the local store for his clothes. He'll upgrade when he gets paid, maybe.

+++

Outside is hot and muggy, but at least the air is fresher than in his tiny little room. Louis moves a surplus-seating folding chair out onto the concrete stoop in front of the church's main doors and sits, propping his feet up on the wood pole supporting the extended roof. He has a pint of ice cream in his lap and a plastic spoon he filched from the Dairy Queen down the road.

It's pretty here. There's a sign in front of the church; he'll probably change the lettering once he's settled. The road past the church is blacktop, the parking lot gravel. The sun is oppressively hot, but it's setting behind the hill the church is nestled against. There are cicadas out, louder than the ones he remembers in North Carolina, and crickets somewhere in the shaggy grass just past his feet.

Louis takes a deep breath. Black raspberry chocolate chip and fresh air. Things could be worse.

He'll have to win over the congregation as best he can, not give them any reason to suspect the truth about his lack of real credentials, but he's always been good at impassioned speeches. People listen to his practice sermons in parks. His previous congregation was more or less fine, too. They started questioning toward the end - he was young, and ultimately polarizing - but he's had time to mature. He's traveled from city to city whenever he's had the money for gas and practiced giving sermons - filling in for real preachers when he can, sermonizing in parks when he can't. 

He's not particularly religious, and he's not particularly studied, and he's absolutely not ordained, but volume counts almost more than real training. He can pray loud and he can make a compelling argument. He knows all the rhetoric. He felt the brunt of it growing up. You can't really avoid the doctrine when it's thrown at you every day like a weapon, and he's learned how to wield it, too, first as a shield and later as a weapon of his own.

It's not even that Louis doesn't believe, because he mostly does. He thinks. He doesn't always practice what he preaches, but then again, he's met enough people in his life - religious and not - to know that almost no one does.

Louis knows this part of the country just as well as he knows the Word of God. The hills are verdant, heavy with heat and humidity and secrets. He'll be able to tease yarns about the sin seeped into the hot-baked bricks of the buildings in the tiny downtown and the frame houses tucked into the little valleys from his congregation quick and easy, and then he'll be able to use that knowledge to command the respect of the people here, eventually. The ice cream is sweet enough, and cool enough here, like ice cream is everywhere. The people inevitably are less so.

It's cave country, and limestone means snakes will be nesting in tangles of underbrush. Mostly garters, but probably a few copperheads, too. Louis doesn't like snakes. It's not for any similarities they may have to the Devil, which was his mother's objection, because Louis isn't convinced they do the Devil's work. He just doesn't like getting bit. 

When Niall called, unexpectedly, and told him about this gig, he mentioned a runoff creek in the woods downhill from the church. Good for wading and catching crawdads, but Louis is back in the part of the world where he'll also have to avoid cottonmouths. Maybe if he doesn't see any he'll do a baptism or two there, of new supplicants to the church. People get into those.

There'll be blackberry brambles somewhere, laden with fruit and just shy of being ripe - more food, and free, if the birds haven't gotten to them yet. He'll find it all tomorrow.

When the plastic spoon bumps the paper bottom of the ice cream pint, Louis lets his eyes slide closed. He misses living in a real house, the clutter of his mom and sister's knickknacks overflowing the limited shelf space, the crackle-hiss of the television as his family watched sermons in the morning and game shows at night. Louis hasn't had a tv of his own since he left home. He'll watch it in hotels, catch up on Wheel of Fortune, but people will talk to preachers about literally everything in the hope of forgiveness for it, and the dramas of their daily lives are more compelling than using what little money he has to spare to pay for cable.

He does miss the hum and chatter of television now, though, in the stillness of the evening with no one around.

And that's when, almost like a prayer answered, he hears the rumble of a motor and the sudden squeal of aging brakes, followed by the spit of gravel under tires. He opens his eyes. In the scant parking lot, there's a rusty pick-up that looks like it was, at one point, maroon. The man behind the wheel kicks the door open and jumps out.

"You realize that this is the church, right?" the man calls, shoving his (large) hands into the pockets of his ratty jeans and walking up the path with long, loping steps. He's got work boots on, scuffed and with a bit of a heel. Even though the heat is beastly and humid, he's wearing a flannel shirt with long sleeves, pushed up halfway his tattooed arms and unbuttoned halfway down his chest to reveal a plain white t-shirt. His hair is stuffed back under a wide-brimmed hat that doesn't seem to do much to protect his face, given the way that the skin on his nose is sunburnt and peeling. "Not some house with a porch."

"The church is the house of God," Louis points out, mildly, once the man is within easy hearing distance. He wipes his hands off on his khakis - they needed a wash anyway - and, standing up, extends a hand. "I'm Pastor Louis Tomlinson."

The man's face goes through several abrupt and hilarious changes: shock, confusion, intrigue. "Wouldn't have pegged you as that," he says, and leans against the pole where Louis just had his feet propped up. He takes Louis's hand and shakes it firmly. He's got a cross tattooed on the side of his hand, and the touch of his palm prickles against Louis's. Louis can't decide whether or not it's unpleasant.

When the man releases Louis's hand, he looks at Louis with a smile. "I suppose you are, though," he says, and then pointedly adds, " _Preacher_."

Louis doesn't know what to make of that tone. Niall doesn't know that Louis never actually went to seminary, in the traditional sense, after they parted ways, so it's not like word could have spread already. "I am," he says, a little stiffly.

The man laughs. "Of course you are," he says, and pauses. "I'm Harry. Styles." He glances up and down Louis's body. "I'm sure I'll see you around, Louis."

" _Pastor_ Louis." It's probably a good idea to build some kind of facade of professionalism already. Deter people from seeking the truth resting right there, just under the surface of Louis's thin veneer of Godliness.

"If you like," Harry says, sounding endlessly amused. "Man of God that you are."

Louis _absolutely_ doesn't know what to make of Harry's tone or his words, so he ignores it. Ignoring things he doesn't understand has worked out for him so far, mostly. "Will I see you in the congregation on Sunday?"

Harry laughs outright. "I doubt it," he says, and tips his hat at Louis as he walks away.

Louis, unnerved, picks up his empty pint of ice cream and makes his way back inside.

His sleep that night is fitful, and unsatisfying.

+++

"And you're settling in okay? Are you sure that you want to live… here? There are houses for sale in town, or for rent - it's awfully small in the church. I'm sure a proper place to live would be much more comfortable."

Louis forces himself to meet the serious gaze of Liam Payne. He's heard enough talk by now to know that Liam is fully credentialed to be a children's minister, but the church - and town - aren't quite big enough for that. He does all the odd jobs around the church, basically keeps it running, and knows everything about everyone in the congregation. Liam is a good man, a Godly man, and - luckily for Louis - he happens to be a very trusting man as well.

"I like to live… frugally," Louis says, which is easier than explaining he doesn't _have_ the money for anything but the cheapest sub-let in town. Living in a church is more respectable than that, anyway. "And close to God."

Liam nods, understandingly. "Of course," he says. "But if you need to use an office, to meet with someone -"

"I have nothing to hide," Louis lies. He has everything to hide, but none of it is material. "If someone isn't comfortable meeting in the sanctuary, or on the porch, they're more than welcome into my room."

"If you insist," Liam says, doubtfully. He sighs and stretches. They're in his house, in his tiny kitchen, a laptop in front of them. Liam's updating him on everything Louis could possibly ever need to know about the business end of the church, which is - helpful, honestly. The budget isn't the greatest - the last pastor brought on immense scandal and ultimately screwed the church over in a way that Louis, with all of his shady background in the ministry, could never even dream of doing.

Louis doesn't preach with malicious intent, though some might claim he does. Zayn has asked him before, even, if Louis went this route to get back at everything that made him who he was at the age of nineteen, alone and terrified and born again to rid himself of the sins that landed him cast out of his home and his church. And that's not it at all. Maybe once, Louis conned his way behind a pulpit to help people who might have been like him, or maybe to pull one over on the entire institution. The truth is that he can't remember at this point. The truth is he never really knew in the first place. He just took the path of least resistance.

Business doesn't take long, which is more or less as Louis hoped for. Liam offers him iced tea when they're done, and they drink it on the porch, the glasses sweating in the heat.

"The people here," Louis says, eventually. "They're good people?"

"Mostly," Liam says, shrugging. He stares off into the distance, and Louis wonders what he's thinking about. "As much as anyone can be." He glances sideways at Louis. "We try."

"That's all God can ask of us," Louis says, reassuringly. He can't read Liam's expression as easily as he'd like to. It's wary, a little. Probably.

"Yeah," says Liam. "That's true." He's silent for a long time, and they watch a bee buzz lazily around the flowers in the garden Liam shares with his neighbor, speckled with pollen.

"I sense there's something you want to tell me about," Louis says, eventually. It's a standard conversation starter for him, a way to probe into the machinations of a new population, and Liam bites at it reluctantly.

"I'm not sure," says Liam. "It's probably nothing."

"You can trust me," Louis says, which is more or less true. Probably less, but who's counting?

"I don't want to point fingers," Liam says. "He in glass houses, and all that. But this might be important."

"What's that?" Louis asks. He loves gossip. It's one of the reasons he (probably) would never have made it in actual seminary school. Something that has gone from 'probably nothing' to 'maybe important' in just a few seconds is something he definitely wants to know. "If it's important, then I'm sure God will understand."

"Okay," Liam says. He fists his hands over his jeans, and when he moves them away, Louis sees a smudge of wet. It might be from the condensation on the iced tea glasses, but then again, it might be sweat. "It's just - there are people in town you should be careful of. Unholy people."

Louis frowns. He hasn't heard that precise turn of phrase used often, but it rings in his ears, loud and aggressive. It was used on him once, before he was born again, and he hadn't even turned from God yet, much less sort-of found Him again. "Some people reject God for reasons that are important to them," he tells Liam, carefully. "But with prayer--"

"No, I know that," Liam says. "I don't mean that he's - that they're _atheists_ , or that they reject God's teachings and laws. I mean unholy."

"Like - Satanists?"

"Not exactly." Liam's mouth twists uncomfortably. "Just - you know Niall Horan, right? He vouched for you."

"Niall's unholy?" Louis can't see it. Niall's at least ten times as devout as Louis is.

"No, I mean - ask him," says Liam. "He knows you, so he'll be more comfortable at explaining it than me. Probably. Just - Pastor Louis?"

"Yeah?"

"Just - a heads up. Harry Styles. He's - trouble. Avoid him."

+++

Niall's visiting his brother and the new baby when Louis calls him as he leaves Liam's, but he promises to drop by as soon as he can and apologizes for not doing so sooner. So Louis goes back to the church. He snaps a picture from the gravel parking lot and texts it to Zayn with the caption _settling in_ , because Zayn was - not wrongfully - concerned when Louis chose to live off of next to nothing in Raleigh instead of, in Zayn's words, "crashing on my couch until you find a real job," and even more concerned when he left for _this_.

It's not until he shoves his phone back into his pocket that he realizes someone's on the porch, in the folding chair still sitting on the stoop. Long legs propped up, encased in jeans that are ungodly tight for the current state of the humidity, beat-up boots --

"I've been warned about you," Louis calls, as he makes his way up the path to the door. "In really, really vague terms."

Harry smiles, slow as the breeze barely rustling the leaves around them. "Already!" he says. He sounds pleased. "That was fast."

"What unholy thing did you do to get people so riled up about you?" Louis asks the question placidly, so as not to seem suspiciously eager. Harry is an unknown quantity. He glances over Harry, whose body is supple and whose lips are sinful, as he speaks. "Sleep with the wrong person?"

"You could say that, I suppose," Harry says. He's properly _smirking_. "It's among my sins."

"The House of God is always open for everyone," says Louis. "If you want to be absolved. And I do perform baptisms."

"I'll just bet you do," Harry says, smiling wider. "Sorry, Pastor. Baptisms don't agree with me. Anyway, you'll never be able to save me."

"There's hope for everyone," Louis says, earnestly. He may not be legitimate, but he always likes a challenge. "If they choose to seek it."

Harry laughs outright. "Well," he says, standing up. "I don't choose that. And even if I did - you're hardly the man of God you try to be, aren't you?"

Cold shudders through Louis, gooseflesh rising on his arms despite the heavy heat surrounding him. He frowns. "I'm - have you heard me preach before?"

"Nah," says Harry. "But I've forgotten more about God than you'll ever learn, so. I know these things."

Louis stares at him, speechless. "I hardly think," he starts, but there's the sound of asphalt under tires behind him, and the next thing he knows, Harry's grinning at him, and waving, and darting out of sight from the road, walking away behind the church and down into the thicket of trees surrounding the creek below.

+++

Niall comes by later that evening. The summer has been treating him as summers generally do, a deep red sunburn on top of a similarly deep tan. It looks like he's stopped dying his hair since Louis knew him, years ago, but it's still light from hours spent out in the sun.

When Louis knew Niall back in Lexington, back when Louis was just trying to make it in the first city he could get to, Niall was trying to make it on the stud farms but mostly taking bit work on tobacco farms. Despite the intervening years, Niall's looks haven't changed much since the summer Louis was crashed on the couch in Niall's crowded and tiny apartment, just barely born again and trying to figure out what the fuck to do now that he didn't have a family to call his own.

Louis ultimately decided to pretend to be a credentialed preacher, and Niall looks to have continued to work outside. They haven't kept in touch much since Niall moved back home from Lexington, just a few postcards and, later, texts here and there, so Louis isn't entirely sure what he's up to now that keeps him outdoors. There are tobacco farms in this part of the state, too, but none of them are exactly close to the town. The limestone mine drying up is what drove Niall to leave in the first place, years ago, and the mushroom farms in the abandoned mines have long since been abandoned, too. 

There's cattle, Louis supposes. Cattle and drugs and God, and Louis has cornered the market on God here.

Niall's driving a truck, too, with a trailer hitch, but that doesn't really clarify anything around these parts.

"Pastor Louis!" he says cheerfully, loping up to the church door. Louis stands, a little awkwardly, but Niall just pulls him into a hug. "It's been years!"

"It has," Louis says, clapping Niall on the back and breaking the hug. "Thanks for, you know. Thinking of me for this."

"No problem," says Niall. He leans against the wall of the church, pushing the mop of his hair out of his face. It sticks straight up, gilded in the light of the setting sun. There's a patch of skin high on his forehead that's noticeably lighter than the rest of his face. "Everyone was rushing to figure out who could take on the church on short notice, and we didn't have enough time for a full-on proper selection process, so I just happened to mention that I'd heard my old roommate was out of preacher-work, and here you are!"

"Here I am," Louis agrees, smiling faintly. He pauses. "I don't – you know. Have a lot of food to offer."

Niall laughs. "Unless you've improved dramatically at cooking in the past twelve years, I don't know that I'd want anything you have to offer, anyways. No offense. Some of the ladies here make a mean casserole so like, depend on them for food at church potlucks and just bring your killer sweet tea instead."

"Thanks, Horan," Louis says, dryly, but his smile deepens nonetheless. "My _point_ was, I picked some blackberries earlier. If you want any."

"I did just eat at Greg's," Niall says. "But Morehead is a long enough drive away that I could do with a snack, so – sure. Bring 'em out."

"I heard from Liam that Greg has another new baby?" Louis asks, as he moves inside to get the bowl of berries, and just like that they fall into a drawn-out catching-up session, sitting on a ledge of rock that Niall shows him, a couple hundred yards from the church, overlooking the creek. 

Niall, it turns out, works at the local state park, where he spends most of his time teaching kids how to canoe and guiding horseback rides and spelunking where he's not technically supposed to. His brother, Greg, is a nurse at the hospital forty minutes away, and has three kids and a wife who works at the university there.

It isn't until the sun has nearly set and they're swatting at mosquitoes more than they are talking that Louis thinks to bring up Harry.

"Niall," he says, interrupting Niall in the middle of a drawn-out story that has something or another to do with goats and someone trying to clear a hillside for crops. "I was meeting with Liam Payne earlier. He said to ask you about – Harry Styles?"

Niall's face shutters so quickly it's like watching the lights go out. "Harry Styles," he says, darkly. "That man is bad news."

Louis hasn't seen Niall in over twelve years, and his memory of their summer together may be a little shaky, but he thinks that he can count the number of times Niall has called someone bad news on one hand. One finger, even: the man who bought out the farm Niall was working at and drove it into the ground. "Coming from you," he says. "That's saying a lot."

Niall cuts his eyes across at Louis. There's a near-unrecognizable twist to his mouth. "Listen to me," he says. "I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but Louis – I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Harry is the Devil hisself."

"The –" Louis breaks off, staring at Niall. "Really?"

"I mean," Niall says, and he tries for a smile but it comes out more like a grimace. "He obviously can't be the actual Devil, 'cause, you know, he can withstand having the mark of God tattooed on him, and I think Gracie from down the way threw holy water on him and it didn't start, like, actually smoking or anything when it hit him, but – he's as close as they come."

"Are you sure he hasn't just been, you know. Branded as evil and cast out from society here?" Louis asks, carefully, because he's been likened to a Devil in his time, too, and unscrupulous though he may be, he's absolutely still one hundred percent human.

Niall sighs a little and rests a hand on Louis's shoulder. "Harry's not a case like you were, Louis," he says, heavily. "It's not just that he's been accused of sin and cast out. And even if he _was_ , he's shown absolutely no signs of repentance. So."

"Okay," says Louis. "So what's he done to be condemned by, like, everyone I've talked to?" He pauses, debating admitting that he's met Harry twice, and decides to go for it. "He – swung by the church. He seems very direct, and not very Christian, but that's hardly call to call him basically the devil."

"You weren't here for Pastor Ben's whole… downfall," says Niall. "Some people said that Harry was temptation in human form, but it's more than that. He debases everything to do with God. He roots out the faith in people and tries to… twist it. Make it unclean and bad."

"Can you be a little more specific than that?" Louis asks. Niall's description is pretty vague. Louis won't argue that Harry is irreverent, but he could probably argue that Game of Thrones and seasons two through five of Glee also collectively debase everything to do with God.

"He led Pastor Ben and his wife Meredith into temptation separately," says Niall. "And spread seeds of doubt among half the congregation. And worse." The look on his face is darker and more closed-off than ever. He grimaces at Louis, apologetically. "That's really all I can say. The rest is rumor. Like, there's stuff about him being not quite human, but I don't really like accusing anyone of being not-human, you know?"

"I see," Louis says. He purses his lips and wipes the blackberry juice staining his fingertips off on his shorts. "I see."

+++

The thing about Harry Styles is that he's uniformly hated by almost everyone in town. The other thing about Harry Styles is that he's always hanging around the church. The evening after Louis's first sermon – more of a greeting to the congregation, a promise that Louis knows that the people here are Godly and that he is here to help them stay that way – Harry slouches up the path in that same ratty pair of jeans, with that same wide-brimmed hat doing nothing to protect his peeling nose. His hair is curling even more in the humidity of the evening, and he's grinning just as wickedly as the last time Louis saw him.

"Heard you give a good sermon, Preacher," he calls, picking his way gingerly from the parking lot.

It's dark out now, the only light spilling through the few windows of the church and the lightning bugs pulsing in the grass. Louis has a cigarette in his hand, but he hasn't lit it. Smoking is an expensive habit, and one that he dropped long ago, but it reminds him of when things were simpler so he flirts with starting again whenever he's feeling his past particularly strongly. "How would you hear a thing like that?" he asks. He doesn't raise his voice, because Harry is already close enough to hear him just fine, probably. He flicks his lighter again and again, flame spurting up and disappearing like the tick of a clock. "Word on the street is no one will come close enough to you to tell you anything."

"I have my ways," Harry says, shrugging. "Anyway, not everyone here hates me."

Louis is tired, so tired. He'd forgotten how exhausted he gets, sermonizing in new places. It's for a good cause – it's nice to have a reliable roof over his head again – but while he generally likes people, he'd forgotten how difficult it is to go into a new congregation without knowing if they'd kick him to the curb if they knew certain things about him, besides his lack of credentials. 

He's tired, and he's fairly certain that no one would begrudge him a little rudeness towards the town pariah, which is why he flicks the lighter again and says: "Does everyone hate the people who like you?"

Harry doesn't seem to mind the question. "Probably," he says, cheerfully. "No matter how many times people tell you to love the sinner but hate the sin, no one really loves a sinner, do they?"

The cold that Louis sometimes feels around Harry rushes through his stomach again, leaving him clutching at his belly to try and contain it. When he manages to move his hand away, he shoves the cigarette back in the pack and puts it aside. 

There's no fucking reason to bring up the past, even in passing thought. It's over and done with and firmly behind him. He knows better than most how no one loves a sinner – has done since he was just a teenage boy. Being an illegitimate pastor may be the biggest _actual_ sin he's ever committed, but the only person who really knows the truth about all of that is Zayn, and he's not one to judge Louis for it. 

Most people like Pastor Louis. Sometimes Louis thinks his even family would like Pastor Louis, if they knew him. Not everyone would like Actual Louis, though, if they knew him.

In the faint light coming through the church windows, Louis can see that Harry's face has twisted into something even more triumphant and strange. "I'm sure you know all about sinners, Pastor," he says. If anything, he sounds – gleeful.

"Why do people think you're not entirely human?" Louis asks, abruptly.

It's meant to be a cutting question, a distraction from whatever angle Harry is taking, but Harry actually _laughs_. "Well, _Pastor_ ," he says. "They're not entirely wrong. I'm _not_ entirely human." He purses his lips. "But I'm probably more of a human than you are a preacher, so really, I'm more honest with them than you are."

"I have no earthly idea what you're talking about," Louis says immediately, but his words sound hollow even to him.

"How _do_ you sleep at night?" Harry asks, conversationally. "Are you just purely corrupt, so you're fine with lying to entire congregations about your legitimacy as a man of God, or do you tell yourself that your conviction is enough to not be a complete _liar_ about who you are? Do you think that your dedication to your charade is enough to make up for the sin of impersonating someone you're not and building up your deception so carefully?"

"Do you get off on leading questions?" Louis asks. He's flicking the lighter faster and faster, so he forces himself to stop. He grips the body of it instead, tight enough that he can feel the imprint of the striker against the base of his thumb. "You have absolutely no basis for these disgusting accusations."

"I can see into your soul," Harry says, simply. He shrugs. "You're curiously difficult to lead into temptation, because of how you're not actually a man of God, which would be _so_ easy, but you try to seem like you are, so you're even more resistant to me." His teeth glint sharply in the light – a smile. "I was shocked when you first told me who you were, because of how little God there is in you. At first I thought you might be on my side of things – which would have been great; we could have wrecked beautiful havoc together – but you're actually much more complicated than that."

He reaches out and touches Louis's hand. Gooseflesh breaks out on Louis's arm again, radiating from Harry's touch. It doesn’t quite burn, but it doesn't not-burn, either. Louis jerks his hand away. "What on _earth_ are you talking about?"

"You're a challenge, Pastor Louis," Harry says. He tips his head against the wall and closes his eyes briefly. His hat gets caught, and lifts away from his head. Somehow, Louis is surprised not to see horns. "I like that."

"You caught me fifteen years too late to sway me," says Louis. He's long since moved past thinking that who he is – who he used to let himself be, because lying about wanting to wait for marriage to have sex with a beautiful wife felt like an even bigger sin than wanting to touch Greg Bentley in the boy's room after sophomore English – is an actual sin, but he doesn't jeopardize the devout preacher he pretends to be anymore. He shoves the lighter in his pocket and stands up. He debates going inside, but Harry would probably count that as a win, and he doesn't want to give Harry the satisfaction. "How are you not precisely human?"

Harry laughs. "I'm not going to give away all of my secrets, am I?" he asks. "Let's just say that what I doesn't _particularly_ fit in with the brand of Christianity you pretend to espouse, but it's more fun to play with people who don't know what to make of me." He stands up straight and stretches. His back cracks, and his shirt pulls tight against his torso, but Louis doesn't let himself focus on that. "I'm not Satan, if that's what you were wondering."

"I wasn't," says Louis. He hasn't believed in Satan the way that he has the power that the fear of Satan gives people, not since he started wondering whether it's God that he gives credit to, or just the power and importance of a belief in God. 

But then again, while he hasn't completely written the existence of God off yet, he also hasn't really brought himself to believe that there are beings other than humans out there.

If Harry's telling the truth about what he is, though, that calls everything else into question.

"I'm not an angel – fallen or otherwise – either," Harry continues, shoving his hands in his pockets. "In case you were wondering if I was, like, Matt Damon in Dogma except hotter. Angels are fucking boring."

"Is God boring, too?" Louis asks. He's not convinced that Harry is telling the truth about anything, but the fact that Harry saw through his charade so quickly makes him want to give credence to Harry's claims. "Is that why you do... things?"

"Nah, that's not my beef with God," Harry says. "God can be fun when They actually get involved in shit down here. Not that They really have in, like, a century or two. But God has Their moments."

"Do you lead people to temptation to try and instigate stuff with God?"

"I very much doubt that God cares about me convincing a few people to have some fun," Harry says. "Anyway, it's not like people really stop believing in God when I'm done with them. I'm often the closest they'll ever get to anything truly divine."

"People around here call you unholy," Louis says. He's always been good at complicated conversation, but he feels lost whenever he talks with Harry. Maybe he'll take Harry's claim of not being human at face value, because then at least Louis can rest assured that he's good at complicated conversation, as long as it's with actual human beings.

"I am." Harry's teeth seem even sharper in the light when he smiles again. "But I'm not, like, mundane or whatever, so that's still closer to divine."

Louis is quiet for a long time, processing the conversation. "Look," he says at last. "If you're here because I'm some kind of challenge to you and you want to sway me, you might as well give up now. It's not like you can instil in me some kind of desire to sin that isn't already there. It's not like I'm going to act on it, either, though. So. You may as well just let me do my thing here."

"I don’t want to stop you from doing your, uh, thing," Harry says. "The most fun preachers are the corrupt ones who don't get run out of town. It's a pity that Ben started feeling actual guilt and let things come to light." He looks Louis over carefully and places a deliberate hand on Louis's chest. "I could sway you, if I wanted," he says. "I do have the ability to compel people to do things they wouldn't normally. But I don't like doing that. It feels – disingenuous, you know? And gross. I much prefer it when people sway themselves."

Harry may be not-entirely-human, or whatever the hell it is that he truly is, but Louis is absolutely, entirely human, and so there's a heat in his belly at Harry's touch, a familiar heat. He felt this heat with Greg Bentley fifteen years ago, and with Zayn occasionally since then, and countless other men before and after he was born again. 

He hasn't acted on it since he chose preaching, though, or at least not in places where he actually does his work so as not to jeopardize his lies, and there's no reason to act on it now. "Good luck with that," he says, and he pushes his way inside the church.

Harry doesn't follow.

+++

Louis spends the ensuing week getting to know the congregation.

It's an interesting process, in that it's intensely similar to and yet somehow completely different from all of the other times he's gotten settled in a new place since he decided preaching was the way forward. It's the first time he's lived in a town this small since he was just a dumb kid, convinced that he knew more about God's will than anyone else in town and thus could decide for himself the hierarchy of sins. 

It isn't the first time he's been back to Kentucky since he left Lexington twelve years ago, but it is the first time he's come back with the intent to stay, and everything rings truer to his childhood than it does to when he lived in North Carolina, or Mississippi, or the misbegotten month he tried to live anywhere but the South and learned that he couldn't shed that part of himself so easily. 

It's an entirely different part of the state, Mammoth Cave traded in for Carter Caves; Bowling Green as the nearest city, if you could call it that, for Morehead; the Pennyroyal karst for Appalachian hollers, but it's still so intrinsically rural Kentucky that it makes Louis want to scream a little.

God bless Niall, who unofficially facilitates Louis's meetings with the townspeople, and Liam, who vouches for him as well, because while the people are welcoming as anything, inviting Louis-the-pastor over for dinner and conversation in little bits and chunks of family groups, they still don't trust him as a newcomer yet. 

Louis understands, and isn't offended by it – he was the same way, once upon a time. He would hope that the people here would be more willing to welcome a man of God in, stranger or no, but the more whispers he hears about Pastor Ben and his wife Meredith and the calamity with that Styles guy, the more he understands. 

Sometimes he thinks that not even God Himself would get a free pass in this day and age, anyway. 

Everyone in town seems to love Niall, which Louis completely understands, and the nights where Niall's actually able to stay at the dinners are the easiest. Niall's presence enables Louis to quickly pick up the rhythm of the banter he's forgotten during his years in North Carolina the what-do-you-says and what-do-you-knows of the greetings, the laconic exchanges following. And as Louis settles comfortably back into the patterns of speech of the area, the information about who's relatives are sick and who's relatives are dying and who's relatives are on the drugs again flow freer with each family he meets. 

"And you," people inevitably ask him, after thanking him for a beautiful sermon. "What about your family?"

The county Louis was born in lends him credence here, but not as much as he'd thought it would; he forgot the depth of the schism between Western and Eastern Kentucky in his time away. Still, when he gets asked about his family, he always mentions where he grew up first, then smiles beguilingly and shrugs. "The Church is my family now," he tells people, time and again, and they nod understandingly – thought what it is that they think they understand, Louis isn't sure – and change the subject to favorite sermons they've heard, or preferred Bible passages, or how insidious Harry Styles is.

Not many people here have read the entire Bible. Louis has, many times. Mostly it's been to build up his charade of expertise, but the first time he read it cover to cover he was desperately searching for answers, for why his family didn't love him anymore, for whether God still could. It doesn't matter that these people haven't, though; they still live their understanding of it from day to day. Actual Biblical phrases mean nothing on their own; it's all in how the Bible's message is packaged and served to the people, and whether it's presented in a way that's palatable to them. So Louis collects his congregation's implied interpretations of the Scripture and weaves them into his next sermon. 

He also collects complaints about Harry. He actually engages in the discussions about Harry a few times, asking a person here and there if there's anyone who doesn't deserve at least an attempt at being saved, but when he keeps being met with "Harry doesn't," he drops his persistence and just listens.

Most people can't put their finger on why Harry bothers them so much, apart from the scandal with the last pastor and his wife, but one nine year old girl has, in Louis's estimation, an excellent reason: "I just don't like him," she says.

Louis asks, "And why is that?"

She purses her lips for a long moment before saying decisively, "He looks like a terrapin."

It's all Louis can do to bite back his laughter. "That he does," he agrees, and holds out his hand for a high five.

+++

He comes to recognize Harry's footfalls on the concrete stoop outside of the church by sound alone. "Jeanette thinks you look like a turtle," he tells him, coming outside. Harry never makes a move to enter the church, so Louis could just as easily ignore him when he comes by, but that feels a little too much like letting Harry win.

"That Darcy's girl?" Harry asks, sitting down with his back to the clapboard wall. He pouts. "I didn't even merit the serpent of Satan?"

"Sorry," Louis says, unapologetically. "Just your regular, run of the mill freshwater turtle."

"I must be doing something wrong," Harry says. He tilts his head back. He looks tired. His nose has finally stopped peeling, and the color of it is patchy now, his tan interspersed with the red of new skin. Louis contemplates suggesting sunscreen, but he doesn't actually know if beings who claim not to be quite human get skin cancer. "Damn."

"I've been warned off you no less than five times this week," Louis says. "If that's your goal, I rather think you're doing something right." He pauses. "Why do you stay here, if people hate you so much?"

"And move somewhere where I have to build up an entirely new bad reputation?" Harry asks, smiling faintly. "Trust me, I could fuck a _man_ in broad daylight somewhere else and it would still take me years to cultivate this kind of hatred."

It sounds lonely to Louis, but then again, he's been hated for much less than Harry seems to be and moved away to escape that hatred, to try and find a place where someone, anyone, would still talk to him without _sodomite_ written accusatorily all over their face. "Why?"

Harry grins, sharp and off-putting. "I feed off of their hatred," he says, shrugging. "The more deep-seated it is, the more delicious."

"If you say so," says Louis, uncertainly.

"Anyway," says Harry. "Occasionally I get fresh new preachers to corrupt, because unlike _some_ I could name, usually they aren't already." He throws a glare at Louis with that, and Louis just rolls his eyes because he can't think of any other response. Harry shrugs. "In the long run, if you've been around as long as I have, a decade of this goes by in the blink of an eye."

"I see," Louis says, even though he doesn't, really. 

"Y'know," Harry says, twisting to look at him. "If you feel bad about how ostracized I am, or whatever, you could always just let me seduce you. Lend me your company."

"No." Louis says it immediately and sharply, and Harry, curse him, laughs again. 

"Well," he says. "It's always an option."

+++

June fades into July and it gets even muggier outside. Louis is fairly certain that the air conditioner in the church has just given up on doing anything but making noise, and he sweats through his preaching clothes earlier and earlier into each sermon, watching the congregation's outfits get progressively limper in turn.

He catches onto the rhythm of what they want to hear soon enough, and starts twisting his sermons to suit it. He doesn't touch on homosexuality at all in his services, but then again, he never has.

Harry doesn't let up. He drops by twice a week, like clockwork – Sunday nights after Louis has come back from sharing dinner at someone's house, and midday Wednesdays, when it's too hot for anyone in their right minds to be outside and see them. 

Louis entertains Harry, because Harry reminds him of himself a little bit, if Louis had deviated completely from God after losing his family instead of being born again and trying to make things right with the Lord – trying to make the Lord right with himself – immediately thereafter. Harry is perceptive and cocky and always wears the same outfit whenever Louis sees him, and he says these little things that give credence to his claims of not being entirely human, but he never explains them and Louis still doesn't know what he means by that, so mostly he lets it slide. 

Louis won't admit it, but it's also nice to have someone to talk to – even if he _is_ the spawn of a demon, or a depraved human, or a lonely old loon, or _whatever_ \- who knows that Louis is a fake, and doesn't seem to judge him for it. There's really only one other person in the world that Louis knows who's like that, except he suspects Zayn, even though he _is_ more or less a man of God, only doesn't care because his God isn't Christian. 

_miss u_ , he texts Zayn, watching fireworks burst over the hill across from the church's stoop, a bottle of beer sweating in his hand. He'd been invited to a celebration, but he's always most comfortable with his loneliness on the Fourth of July and he'd rather let himself feel lonely without people around him.

Zayn doesn't respond for three days, but that's par for the course. Luckily, services are just over when Zayn finally calls him back.

Louis excuses himself from chatting with Jennifer from the bank and ducks back into his little room behind the sanctuary. "Hello?"

"I'll visit you when you move to a place that isn't over 99% white, buddy," Zayn says, laughing across the line. The connection isn't great, but hearing Zayn's voice, tinny and patchy though it may be, is.

"That's fair," Louis agrees. He met Zayn in Mississippi and followed him to Illinois. Zayn had stayed when Louis left. He's back South now, if Charlottesville really counts, finishing up his doctorate, but unlike Louis, he's not likely to stay there. They're both relatively mobile people, but Zayn's bones aren't wedded to the place where he was born like Louis's sometimes feel. Zayn feels safer outside of the South. Louis just feels colder and more detached.

He misses fucking Zayn sometimes – often – but even if Zayn were still single, he'd feel weird doing it on this kind of job anyway.

"Are you okay, though?" Zayn asks.

Is he? "I'm settling in," Louis says. "The people here aren't as wary about the new guy anymore."

"Anyone seem like they're coming close to figuring you out?"

"Not exactly," says Louis. "One guy, but no one ever talks to him, and he claims that he isn't human, anyway."

"Um," says Zayn.

"Word on the street is that he's the root of all evil in this town," Louis says. "Literally everyone has warned me about him. Apparently he's truly unholy."

"Um," says Zayn.

"He's kind of weird to talk to," says Louis. "Keeps talking about how I'm a particular challenge to seduce."

"Um," says Zayn. "Sounds like you're having an interesting time back in Kentucky."

"I guess you could say that," Louis concedes. He's been paid, at least, and if he manages to hold this job for another few months before people start to suspect that he's not everything it says on the tin, he'll have enough to actually start for real somewhere else instead of being forced to crash in a church's back room. He supposes that's a measure of success. "People like my sermons."

"Of course they do, you're literally the most compelling person I know," Zayn says. Louis can practically hear him roll his eyes over the phone. "Honestly, if you weren't still, you know, alive and trying to make it the way that you are, I'd make you the focus of my dissertation."

Hilariously – to Louis, at least – Zayn is getting his doctorate in theology, ethics, and culture. "I'll be your seminal work when I retire," Louis promises. He's promised it before. They both know he doesn't mean it.

"I appreciate that," Zayn says, dryly. A pause, then he asks, cautiously: "Have you figured it out yet?"

"Whether Harry is actually not really human?" Louis asks. He knows that's not what Zayn means, but Zayn gets on him every time they talk, which is another reason Louis didn't give up and move to Virginia to sleep on Zayn's couch after the eighth month of preaching to literal fucking trees every day in Raleigh. 

"Why you keep trying to make it as a fake pastor," Zayn says. "Or maybe why you insist on calling yourself fake."

"I literally do not have any credentials," Louis says. "I am completely fake."

"Yeah," says Zayn. "But you know the Bible back to front and you know the rhetoric and you give sermons people like to hear. So. Are you really?"

"Thank you, Professor Ethics," Louis says, sharply, so Zayn drops it. Which is good. Louis doesn't want to think about his own motives anymore tonight. If he and Zayn were actually in the same place, and Zayn weren't in a relationship, he'd probably distract both of them by blowing Zayn right now. Zayn would probably attribute it to Louis's fucked-up past. Zayn likes to attribute a lot of things to Louis's fucked-up past. Louis mostly just tries to forget his past, however impossible that task may be.

The question about whether Louis is truly a fake is new in Zayn's repertoire, but Louis doesn't know why Zayn bothers to ask. Literally anyone would find him fake. He never received any kind of actual training and he completely falsified his ordination. Harry could sense his lack of conviction and his complicated relationship with his own faith at a single glance, not that Louis will give Harry any real credit for seeing through his lies. He's a fake pastor who preaches on the nuance of sin regularly, despite committing more sins of his own than most in any congregation he's had.

Honestly, he probably _deserves_ to fall even farther from God's grace and succumb to someone as shady as Harry.

+++

The next time Harry shows up, there's a gullywasher beating down outside – typical for these valleys in the summer. Louis is standing in the doorway to the church, watching the rain sluice down from the heavens and churn the ground into a muddy mess. Harry pulls up in his truck, the gravel of the parking lot grinding wetly together under his tires, and by the time he reaches the stoop, his hair is plastered, soaking, against his scalp.

He looks a bit like a drowned rat. 

Louis stares at him for a moment, because Louis is human and, human or not, the t-shirt under Harry's ubiquitous long-sleeved flannel is white and clinging to his chest, and then he shakes himself. "Do you want to come inside?"

Harry stares at him for a long moment, blinking rainwater out of his eye. For a split second, Louis is pretty sure that he's never seen Harry look so unnerved before, but then Harry goes and ruins it all but laughing uproariously until he collapses, breathless, against the door frame. "You'd let me into the _church_?" he asks, and, well.

"When you put it that way," Louis says, archly, even though he's still not totally convinced that Harry isn't just a really weird human.

"You'd let me desecrate such hallowed ground?"

Louis rolls his eyes. "You are altogether too dramatic," he tells Harry. "I doubt you'd leave so much as a smudge of sin on the pews."

"You've gotten more confident," Harry says, looking Louis up and down. There's a strand of his hair plastered against his forehead. If Harry were anyone else, and Louis were anyone else, he'd probably push it back for him. But Harry is Harry and Louis is Louis, so he keeps his hands to himself. "That's interesting."

"You've gotten even more vague," Louis returns. Maybe Harry wasn't truly unsettled at the start of their conversation, but it was enough for Louis to feel like maybe he's been getting some traction in their talks after all. If there's anything he's good at, it's talking at people. Maybe he's getting better at talking to Harry. "That's less interesting."

Harry laughs again. "In all seriousness," he says. "This church – complete shithole that it may be –"

"Hey!" Louis protests. It may be a shithole church, true, but it's _his_ shithole church that didn't have enough time to check for adequate references before they hired him on, so he feels a little partial to it. "Rude."

"A _total_ shithole," Harry says, grin playing around his lips. "But it's still consecrated ground."

"So?" Louis asks – demands, specifically.

"So I'm unholy, so me and consecrated ground don't really mesh well," Harry says, shrugging.

Louis narrows his eyes at Harry. He's had time to learn more stories about this town's past from one of the more salacious gossips in his congregation. "Didn't you fuck Pastor Ben in this church?"

"Well," Harry says, and he's silent for a moment. "Yes. Technically I can cross over the boundary and enter the church." He pouts at Louis. "But it doesn't _feel_ good. You know, unless I'm getting something for my efforts. So unless you've changed your mind about giving into the sins you crave..."

"I haven't," Louis says, stiffly. 

"Well, then," Harry says. "I don't really relish having awful shooting pain and a massive boner just from being in a certain kind of building if you're not going to suck me dry, so I'll just stay wet. Out here."

"What, you don't want a way in so you can divest yourself of your clothes and start jerking off against the altar?" Louis asks. He's honestly a little surprised.

Harry looks surprised, too – pleasantly so. "Pastor Louis!" he says. "I didn't know you had it in you. Have you been _thinking_ about me doing that?"

Louis hadn't, but now that he's brought it up he can't quite squelch the thought of Harry, spread out against the pulpit, the rough stain of it sticking against his skin, cock hard and weeping. He knows for certain that Harry's tongue isn't forked and he doesn't have horns – though his teeth are a little sharp – but maybe there's something underneath his clothes that marks him as unholy. Maybe his feet are cloven hooves, stuffed into boots. Maybe he's got a bit of a tail. Maybe nothing.

Louis wonders if the cross on the pulpit would sear into Harry's skin, how that would look, how it would smell.

He clears his throat. "Sorry to burst your bubble," he says. "But I haven't."

"I'm sure," Harry says, tone dry with disbelief. He shrugs. "It's not a bad idea, actually. Maybe I'll have to drop by sometime and do that."

"Do I have to worry about coming home to seeing you in the way that God absolutely never intended?" Louis asks. He's not truly concerned, except for how he really kind of is.

Harry purses his lips. "No," he says. "I'm not about forcing myself onto people like that. I'll wait for you to come to me."

"What makes you so certain that I will?" Louis asks. Harry treats seducing Louis as an inevitability, but Louis hasn't felt the urge to tangle with anything truly unholy since he was seventeen and furious with God.

"Wishful thinking," Harry says, cheerfully. "I've never seduced anyone with quite as complicated a relationship with God as you have, you know. Usually it's all people who claim to be truly devout or people who don't even believe. You know, until they've been with me."

"Of course," Louis murmurs. The wind shifts a little, and rain spatters under the little overhang of roof against the door. He blinks the wet out of his eyes. "Because you instil the fear of God into everyone you fuck."

"It's an unfortunate side effect," Harry says, seriously. "But sometimes fun. Sometimes they question _everything_."

"Because you've corrupted them from the path of the Lord?"

"People are always going to be as good or evil as they already are at heart, Pastor," Harry says. "If they sleep with me, they're obviously on one side of the spectrum already, and then they've cemented it because they've gone and lain with the unholy. But they don't lose any faith in God for it, and sometimes they gain a little. Whether they seek restitution from Them afterward is entirely up to the individual. I don't know how that process goes, and I don't particularly care. It's just interesting to watch them scramble, for a little." He shrugs. "I like unsettling people."

"I got that impression from you, yeah," Louis says. He laughs, but it's mirthless. "Why are you telling me all of this, though?"

"It unsettles you?"

It does, but Louis isn't going to give Harry the satisfaction of admitting as much. Harry probably already knows, anyway. Damn him. "You're just kind of showing your hand already, aren't you?"

Harry looks Louis up and down, critically. "You don't like it when people lie to you," he says. "I intrigue you because you sense the truth in what I say, and you want to know more." He grins. "That's how I'll get you."

"Good luck with that," Louis says.

Harry scratches at his head, wet hair raising up in cowlicks. "Do I really need it?"

+++

Louis can't help but compare himself against those around him, is the thing. Specifically, he measures his faith, as someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a preacher, against that of his congregation.

He writes these comparisons down in a journal that he keeps tucked under his shitty bed, observations about how pious the people are and how he falls short, how his sins are longer and starker than any of theirs could ever be. 

It's not healthy or good, and he knows it, so he doesn't tell Zayn about it during their semi-irregular conversations. They've had that fight before, anyway, so Louis knows precisely how it will go if he does tell. Zayn will go on for _hours_ about how faith is subjective, and not a token economy where specific acts of piousness will be rewarded with specific prizes from God.

Once, Louis and Zayn got drunk together and Zayn started comparing Louis's constant need to measure his devotion to God against that of other people to trying to win the biggest prize at Chuck-E-Cheese. Louis shut Zayn up with a blowjob and made a point to never bring it up with him again.

The chances of Zayn going off on a rant about how small Southern towns are more concerned with appearing to adhere to God's writ than actually acting out of true faith and devotion are fairly good, too, because one of Zayn's main focuses in his research is the performance of religion as a form of social currency versus the actual expression of faith, and while Louis doesn't precisely _disagree_ with Zayn's central hypothesis, he also doesn't like to think about it much.

It would be immeasurably inappropriate to tell Niall or Liam how they're better men than he during their now-weekly dinners at Liam's place, with Liam's beautiful fiancé from Cincinnati opening her kitchen to Niall's truly skilful way with off-brand boxed dinners from Walmart, but the only other option for expressing his faith-based concerns is Harry and he _absolutely_ cannot tell Harry something like that. 

So he keeps the knowledge that he's a farce of a Christian in addition to a farce of a preacher tucked deep inside of him, to prod at when he's alone at night and wondering how is life would have been if he hadn't grown up religious.

Niall knows that Louis prefers men. There's no way that he couldn't know that, given how they met, how Louis had just left everything he knew because of his preferences. Enough years have passed that Louis doesn't remember whether Niall is of the school of thought that inclinations toward homosexuality are fine as long as they aren't associated with acting upon those inclinations in any way, shape, or form, or whether Niall just plain doesn't care. The first month that Louis lived in town, he was a little concerned that Niall would bring it up with Louis, but by now he remembers that Niall has always respected the way that everyone has their own private stories that aren't his to share or dwell upon. 

And so the dinners with Niall and Liam and Sophia become the most comfortable part of Louis's week, outside of when he's at the pulpit every Sunday morning, settling into his bones and his sermons and preaching loud enough that the unnerving wakes of Harry's visits are no longer palpable to Louis in the church atmosphere. Liam is very sweet with Sophia, proud of her even though he's been trained as a youth minister and she's vocally not convinced of God, and Niall has a great rapport with both of them.

"I wish Sunday School was feasible here," Liam says, nearly every dinner, and Sophia covers his big rough hand with one of hers and squeezes. "But there isn't the space."

"Or the congregation size," Niall always says, reaching for another buttered dinner roll. "You could always drive out to Morehead on a Sunday if you want to teach one. Greg's church is looking for a new one."

"Dunno," Liam says, and once, with a smile at Louis, he adds, "I like the services here just fine."

They don't talk about God much at the dinner table, because Sophia shuts down those conversations, instead talking about the strip mining that's starting up again southeast of town, or the nest of snakes she found by the bridge when she was in Olive Hill for lunch the other day, or the politics of being a big-city girl in small-town Eastern Kentucky. Louis is grateful to her for it; the variation in dinner conversation topics helps him tune out his inferiority complex sometimes. 

Sophia also doesn't like talking about Harry Styles, though, and Harry has quickly become Louis's favorite topic of conversation to overhear. "Satan or not," she had said, the first time Louis tries to bring him up around the dinner table, "He's still a person. I swear there are hundreds worse in this county alone."

"Have you had a conversation with him, then?" Louis had asked, and was a little taken aback when she just blushed and shook her head.

"It was too one-sided to be a proper conversation," she had said, and that was that.

At first, Niall would pick Louis up on his way in from the state park and take him to Liam's for dinner and drop him off again after, but lately, now that the heat is finally just starting to break, Louis walks back alone while Niall lingers behind. 

The arrangement suits Louis just fine until the first time Harry falls into step with him not three minutes after he's turned off the main road to shortcut through the trees back to the church. 

"There are all manner of evil things lurking in these trees," Harry had said, the first time he escorted Louis back home. 

"Besides yourself?" Louis had asked, and Harry laughed so hard they had to stop walking for a full five minutes so he could compose himself.

+++

"It feels kind of like you've stopped trying to sway me to fall," Louis says one day. It isn't fall yet, but it doesn't feel like summer's going to last for much longer. He and Harry are sitting behind the church, out of sight of the road. The clapboard walls are comforting against Louis's back, warm from the day's sun even though there's the slightest hint of a chill in the air as night settles around them. The fireflies aren't flashing amongst the grass anymore. "More than I've already fallen, anyway."

"Do you think that?" Harry asks. He lets his head loll to the side, a lazy swing with the back of it still pressed against the wall, so he can look at Louis. "Fascinating."

"I don't know why you would, though," Louis says, and then, uncertainly, trying to hide the tremor sneaking its way into his voice: "Am I beginning to bore you?"

Harry laughs outright at that. "You could never bore me, Pastor," he says. "You're one of the most endlessly intriguing people I know." He stretches a little, and his back cracks grotesquely. "Your faith is all twisted over on itself and yet you never flag in your pursuit of God. You lie to your entire congregation about everything you are, but it isn't really a lie when you get to the root of it. You try more than you have to."

Most of that doesn't feel very true to Louis, so he ignores it. "Are you saying you _like_ me?" he teases, as lightly as he can to try and overcome the hint of weakness he's just shown.

"God forbid," Harry says, dryly, and Louis can't help but chuckle at the very many ways Harry could mean that.

Later that night, when he's all alone, he tries saying it into his mirror: "My friend," he says, quietly, like Harry's hearing extends from wherever it is that he sleeps at night – a crypt, maybe, or a double-wide, or a frame house carefully balanced against the land's tendency to reveal sinkholes entirely unexpectedly, or the back of his truck – all the way through the walls of the church to Louis's meager room. "Harry Styles."

The words twist in his mouth, resting heavy on his tongue, but they don't feel altogether untrue.

It's then that Louis realizes Harry hasn't stopped his bid for Louis's soul, or legitimacy, or whatever it is that he's ultimately after. He hasn't even come close to giving up.

+++

The thing about Harry is that he really is so similar to Zayn in one very specific way: his degree of faith in people's faith.

"I could leave," he tells Louis, picking the green leaves off a bush because he says he likes the way they rot. "Go somewhere a little more open to my efforts."

"You mean, more open to being corrupted away from God's graces?"

"Sure," Harry says, smiling enigmatically. "We'll go with that."

"I thought you said it would be harder to build up an economy of hatred against you and your ways if you moved," Louis says. His shoes are off and he's tangling his feet in the creek. The water feels nice between his toes, and there are no snakes to be seen. He's careful not to dislodge the rock underneath his heels, though; he hates seeing the crawdads that will inevitably be disturbed if he does.

"Well, yeah," says Harry. "Small towns like this are great for that, because everyone's a sinner and no one wants to be found out and they hate beings that pose a threat even more aggressively than anyone in any big city."

"I dunno," says Louis. "The congregation here seems pretty tame. I've heard a lot of gossip by now and there's nothing too shocking." At least, nothing like running a teenage boy out on the rails because he dared to suck another boy's dick, and had the bad luck to get caught, and the audacity to not be repentant for the sin of it. The misfortune of seeing lying as a bigger sin than sodomy. 

"The people here have lived here for decades," Harry says, dismissively. "They've just gotten real good at hiding secrets. You know that Billy Harding has the corner of the OxyContin market in the entire county?"

Louis hadn't known, but it doesn't surprise him that someone in his congregation holds that distinction. Drugs are endemic to the hills, it seems like. People still tell the story of the boy who killed his parents and hid their bodies in the defunct limestone mine just outside of Olive Hill just to get a little more money for dope. As a kid, Louis heard stories of his stepdad bootlegging alcohol in Kentucky's dry counties when he was younger; the moonshine distillers and booze smugglers have given way to dangerous traps built into the forests around here to protect pot plants and worse. So he just shrugs at Harry.

"Well," Harry says, obviously dissatisfied that Louis hasn't risen to his bait. "How about our own precious youth pastor wannabe, Liam Payne?"

Louis can't help but bite. "What about him? He's one of the Godliest men I know."

Harry laughs, derisively. "Liam Payne is an adulterer and a sodomite. Two hundred years ago I could lead an entire mob against him and watch him get tarred and feathered right before my very eyes." He sighs, but his eyes are totally twinkling at Louis's slack-jawed amazement. "I _so_ miss the days of tarring and feathering. Felt a little more like home."

Where's home, Louis doesn't ask. "Liam would never cheat on Sophia," he says instead.

"I never said a word about cheating, did I? She fucks Niall just as much as he does." Harry lifts a shoulder. He's absolutely struggling to hold a straight face, the bastard. "I don't care as much about her role in it, because she doesn't believe in God and I can't use her involvement to my advantage."

"Shit," Louis says. He's mostly impressed, though. "That... explains some things." Like how Niall remains behind when Louis leaves after dinner now, and the way that both Liam and Niall are quick to refute Harry in conversation. Louis wonders what Harry has said to them about it, to make them hate him so.

"That's only the tip of the iceberg here," Harry says, complacently. He wiggles his toes, catching the last of the setting sunlight, dappling through the leaves above them. "This is really the perfect place for me, sinning-wise. And people are so hilariously quick to judge, like that aids and abets the performance of their faith any better. But I _could_ leave, if I wanted. Go somewhere that people are more willing to risk falling in plain sight."

"Was that last bit directed at me?" Louis asks. He thinks he's getting a little bit better at reading Harry. Maybe. Possibly.

"A little bit," Harry admits. When he laughs, he throws his head back, and the light gilds his throat.

Louis forces himself to look away. "I've got my own performing and protecting to do," he says. He'd equivocate, but Harry has made it clear that he already knows all of Louis's truths. 

"Yeah, you're a bit of a tough nut," Harry says. When he straightens up, his hand brushes against Louis's arm. Like clockwork, the gooseflesh raises on the back of Louis's arm, and he feels a chill, and, where Harry has a little cross tattooed on the back of his hand, searing heat.

"Why do you have that, anyway?" Louis asks, ignoring the sensation crawling all over his skin. "If you're like, the Antichrist."

"I'm not," Harry says. "But the Antichrist is a very nice young lady. You'd like her. There will be a _glorious_ battle when her time comes. God may actually start to care about the happenings on this shitty little planet again when she rises." He sighs, happily. "Their angels will wreck devastation on entire cities and I'll be there, tempting humans to fight them and forsake Heaven forever. Beautiful."

"Are you getting hard right now?" Louis asks, not bothering to look. "You're totally getting hard right now."

"Want to do something about it?" Harry asks, and laughs when Louis rolls his eyes at him. "Anyway, if you're wondering whether marks associated with God burn me, they do." He waggles his eyebrows at Louis. "But I like the pain, so."

"So you literally have a tattooed cross burning into the skin of your hand every minute of every day."

"When you put it that way," Harry says. " _Absolutely_ yes." Placidly, he adds, "It also makes a great target when I jerk off."

"Of course it does." Louis can remember a time when he'd be disgusted by this information. He still is, a little, disgusted at the idea of blaspheming God and the symbols of His believers in such a way. Something tells him he'd be more outraged even just a month or two ago, but now he hardly even feels surprised.

Louis is losing sight of his purpose, and that's a problem.

"I have about fifteen more religious tattoos under my clothes," Harry says. "That's one reason I always wear long sleeves. Because my flesh is blatantly reacting to all of them, all the time."

"You're the weirdest hell-creature I've ever met in my entire life," Louis says. He still doesn’t know what, precisely, Harry is. He doesn't know much of anything about Harry – what he does, where he goes when he's not tormenting the townspeople or talking to Louis – but he's stopped trying to figure it all out. Every time he presses, Harry just laughs at him. 

"I'm the only hell-creature you've ever met in your life," Harry says. 

"Yeah," says Louis, borderline fondly. "But you're still probably the weirdest."

+++

Louis doesn't _precisely_ resign himself to giving into Harry, but the thought of what could be, if he does, crosses his mind more than once.

As usual, the end of the stalemate he's holding between what he knows is right and what he wants to do anyway takes him by surprise.

It comes in the form of a phone call from Zayn. "Do you still insist on willful ignorance about stuff that's going on in the wider world around you?" Zayn asks when Louis picks up, not even bothering to say hi first.

"Oh, screw you." Louis laughs, though, because Zayn isn't exactly wrong. "I know enough to put it in my sermons."

"Okay, but that's, like, big stuff that you can't really avoid," Zayn says. He pauses, and sighs, and that's when Louis knows that something's wrong.

"Are you okay?" he asks, immediately, sitting down on the front-row pew. He had been practicing his sermon, about half-aware that Harry was probably lurking outside, listening, the way he's started doing lately. Harry, God curse him, has yet to offer his input on Louis's words, but Louis is fairly convinced it's only a matter of time. He lowers his voice now, just in case.

"Yeah, but Louis," says Zayn. He's quiet for another moment, and then he says: "You know how I keep track of certain things?"

That could mean literally anything. Zayn keeps track of plenty of church news for his dissertation, for one. Plus, Zayn's mom literally runs a free bereavement service as a side job down in Georgia, and she and his sisters will follow obituaries and take on the task of providing families in mourning with food and general house help for a little while following a death in town, and Zayn has picked up a fair few habits from her, as well. "Yeah," Louis says.

"Well." Zayn clears his throat. "David Parrish died."

Somehow, it takes Louis a moment to place the name, and then he's dropping his phone in his lap. David Parrish was his childhood preacher. The one who encouraged his mother to take the actions she did. The one who cast him out of his church when Louis didn't seem repentant for the right sins.

"Sorry," he says, once he manages to pick the phone up again. "Sorry. I – I've got to go."

"Are you okay?" Zayn asks, and then: "Do you need me to come?" 

"I – " Louis pauses. Zayn offering to come to a place that Louis _knows_ would make him feel very unsafe is big, and indicative of how much Zayn truly cares about Louis, despite all of his nagging Louis to, like, explore his deep-seated issues with the universe or whatever. Louis can't ask him to do that. "No. I'll come to you if I need to, okay, Zayn? Promise."

"If you're sure," Zayn says, slowly, and then he sighs. "Love you, bro, okay? Be safe."

"You too," Louis says, and lets the phone fall back to his lap again.

+++

His sermon the next day is muddled at best. He had a great topic picked out, and all the kinks of it worked out as well, but when he stands at the pulpit all the words fly out of his head. "Loss," he says, and falls silent until he notices his congregation fidgeting in their pews, waiting for him to continue. "Loss operates in curious ways." He spreads his hand. "I just learned that my first preacher, the man who showed me just how effectively one person can lead a congregation and spread the word of God and interpret it for his people, now walks with the Lord."

Niall's face, when Louis picks it out in the crowd, is written all over with concern, and Louis fumbles his next words.

It's not a very good sermon, all told, but he must reach people somehow because some of the church ladies squeeze his arms on their way out the door after the service, and little Jeanette flings her arms around him in a tight hug. 

Niall lingers behind all the rest. "Hey," he says, carefully. He puts a hand on Louis's back. "That was an interesting sermon."

"I know I wasn't at my best." Louis sighs and rubs at his eyes. "I had an entirely different topic worked out. That just – happened."

Niall looks Louis up and down a few times, like he's trying to read him. "I thought Pastor David was the biggest asshole you ever encountered."

"Well," Louis says, and stops. "You're not wrong about that."

"He literally encouraged your mother and your entire church to cast you out," Niall says, like Louis doesn't already know all of that. "He caused the biggest crisis of faith you've ever had and it's a fucking wonder you went this route after everything that happened."

Or he showed Louis precisely how bad a preacher could be and still be listened to. An inspiration, really. "Mom didn't need that much convincing, really." He sighs. "I still learned a lot from him. I wasn't exactly, you know, lying back there."

"Still." Niall glances around and then pulls Louis into a fierce hug. "Are you okay?"

"He made me want to become what I am today, you know?" Louis sags into Niall's hold. "To be better than him."

"I know, Louis." Niall squeezes Louis once, firmly, before releasing him. "Come to dinner with me and Liam and Sophia tonight, okay?"

"Think I want to be alone for a bit, to be honest," Louis says. He's never alone on Sunday nights, but Niall doesn't need to know that. He claps Niall on the shoulder to try and show that he's really okay at heart, but Niall winces at the force Louis inadvertently uses, so he must fail on that count. Oops. "Tomorrow?"

"Yeah, sure," Niall says, with a twisted smile that Louis supposes is meant to be sympathetic. "I'll let them know."

+++

Louis goes off into the woods and thinks about getting drunk. Instead, he finds a field at an abandoned old farm and rips out Queen Anne's Lace by the roots until his hands are raw and aching. Acting destructively against God's creation makes him feel like he's young again, and lost, and searching for some kind of answers from an enigmatic world, but then again, so does Pastor David's death.

When he's sick of his own thoughts, he goes back to the church. Predictably, Harry is sitting on the stoop.

"Exciting day, Pastor Tomlinson?" Harry asks, giving Louis a once-over, and when Louis looks down at himself, he's covered in dirt.

Louis came back here for companionship, as twisted as Harry's might be, but now he doesn’t want a single thing to do with him. "Not in the mood, Styles," he says, and pushes past Harry towards the door. It isn't until his hand is on the knob that he realizes Harry's frozen in place, just staring at him. " _What_?"

"Your soul is in turmoil," Harry says, frowning. "Even more than usual."

"Tell me something I don't know," Louis snaps. Slowly, he takes a breath and releases it, trying to force some of his tension out.

It doesn’t really work.

"Sorry," Harry says, and sits on the stoop, and Louis is so shocked to hear Harry apologize for anything that he sits down, too, his back against the door to the church.

The thing is, some people who claim to spread the word of God are probably not actually doing any such thing, so Louis shouldn't feel bad about pretending he's qualified to say the first thing about God, or religion, or being good.

The thing is, Louis still doesn't think it was a sin to suck Greg Bentley's dick when he was just a stupid kid who didn't understand the first thing about how his society rank-ordered actions they considered unforgivable. He doesn't think it's a sin to suck anyone's dick. He doesn't understand why his mother wasn't upset that he was engaging in sexual behavior out of wedlock just as much as she was upset that he was engaging in sexual behavior with a boy when he'd honestly heard more about waiting for marriage than specifically being heterosexual when he was a kid.

The thing is, Louis _knows_ that Zayn thinks that he started faking being a preacher and taking jobs in small Southern towns still entrenched in performing Christianity in the ways they've been performing Christianity for dozens of years so that he can help out another kid dealing with liking the gender the Bible says is wrong if they need it. Maybe to atone for his childhood, or maybe see what it would have been like if someone in a position of power stood up for him. Louis isn't positive. All he knows is that Zayn has been pressing for Louis to admit to that being the driving force behind his decisions, to Zayn but mostly to himself, for almost ten _years_.

The thing is, Zayn is wrong.

"You know God personally?" Louis asks Harry. His voice is rough, so he clears his throat.

"I haven't been formally introduced," Harry says, slowly. "I'm not that important of a – you know. What I am."

"I don't know what you are," Louis says. He's so very tired. His exhaustion creeps through his very bones. He's the tiredest man on the entire God-damned planet. "We've established this."

"I know," says Harry, impatiently. He sighs after a moment though, and says, "Louis, I've been along for a real long time. Don't ask me how long. I don't know. In any case, I've come across God a time or two. They're real. They're just kind of... there."

"But do you have proof?"

"You'll just have to take my word for it," Harry says, with a funny little smile.

"No," Louis says, firmly, and then again: "No. That's unacceptable."

"I'm sorry if you don't want to accept it," Harry says. "But it's all I can offer."

"How do I even know that you're actually not human?" Louis says. "How do I know that you're anything but a dumb fucking man who gets off on playing with people?"

"Faith," Harry says, and Louis groans.

"That's not enough, Harry," he says. He'd meant to snap it, but his exhaustion leeches through into his voice, slurring the edges of his words. "I need more."

Harry's eyes flick over Louis again, and Louis can tell that he's about to say something about giving in to him and finding out, but instead, Harry just frowns. "Why this sudden questioning?" he asks. "Is it to do with your sermon on loss?"

"I just." Louis closes his eyes and sighs. "I need to know that God is real, Harry. I need to know that everything was worth it. I need to know that getting kicked out of my home for kissing Greg Bentley and not even being allowed to see my sisters in fifteen years in the name of God wasn't a complete waste. I need to know that the late Pastor David Parrish told my mom she was doing the right thing for something _besides_ a twisted and misguided sense of conviction. I've been _actively_ trying to find answers for twelve fucking years and all I've found is the subjectivity of belief and nothing about whether everything has been a complete _waste_ or not."

"Trust me," Harry says. "God wouldn't give a damn about your problems." When Louis's eyes fly open, enraged, he holds up a hand. "I mean, maybe They would. I don't presume to speak for Them. I wouldn't want to, anyway. They kind of suck." He rests his hand on Louis's wrist, deliberately. "Anyway, you're not even a real preacher, so why do you give a damn about God, anyway? It should be about whether it was worth it for you, not God."

"It was done in God's name," Louis says. He doesn't pull away from Harry's touch, even though the gooseflesh is strong enough to raise the hair of his arms on end. "I need it to have been done for someone real, at least."

"Well then," Harry says. "It was. Does that make it worth it for you?"

Louis presses his lips together in a thin line. There's a reason he avoids these conversations with Zayn. He doesn't like self-reflection, because being kicked out of his home at the age of seventeen is absolutely not worth it, even if it was done for some hackneyed version of God. "It's not," he says. He says it quietly enough that it's almost lost in the hum of crickets and cicadas, but Harry's hand tightens on his wrist anyway.

"Then make it worth it," Harry says, simply.

"Why is it," Louis says, "That you're some kind of poor excuse for an _actual demon from hell_ and yet you're probably one of the best friends I have?"

As it turns out, when Harry's smiling sincerely instead of twisting his mouth into a smirk, he's got dimples. "Well," he says, smile broadening slowly. "You're some kind of poor excuse for a preacher. So."

Louis peers at Harry. "Are you trying to imply that we deserve each other?"

"Dunno," says Harry. "Would that work on you?"

Louis shoves at Harry. "I wasn't even talking about _sex_ , you devil."

"Not a devil," Harry says, but he's still grinning. "Though I have to say, fucking some, ahem, _poor excuse for a demon_ might be a really good way to stick it to some asshole preacher. Really shock him. Especially if he's dead; he might actually get a whiff of your blasphemous sins now."

"I'm so sure," Louis says, but he starts to think: maybe. 

Probably not, but still. Maybe. If he and Harry ever truly meet halfway. If Harry enters Louis's domain, where Louis holds actual power, however much of a front it may be, and Louis feels like they're on even footing. 

"Stick it to the man," Harry adds.

"We'll see," Louis says, trying not to hope that they do.

+++

By the time Harry comes around again later that week, Louis has shaken off his funk. Shockingly, thinking about his motives for, well, everything has helped him work through Pastor David's death. Not that he'll ever tell Zayn as much.

"Come in," he offers, when Harry makes it to the church stoop through the rain.

"I'll pass," Harry says, but his gaze lingers at the door.

"Come in," Louis suggests, when Harry drops by late Friday night. It's not one of Harry's usual days, and Louis had been in bed, so he comes to the church door in boxer shorts and a bathrobe.

Harry's gaze lingers on his chest. "Maybe next time," he says, licking his lips, and Louis feels a coil of heat deep in his belly.

The following Sunday, Louis just leaves the church door open after it's been swept clean after the service and waits.

Harry stands in the doorway for an hour while they talk, but doesn't move past the threshold.

+++

"I miss sex," Louis says. He's on the phone to Zayn, sitting on his favorite rock under the trees behind the church.

"Then you should probably stop going celibate whenever you take a job," says Zayn. "Just a suggestion."

"I don't want to, you know, be misleading," says Louis.

Zayn cracks up. "What does that even mean?" he says. "How would fucking someone be misleading?"

"You know what I mean," Louis says, because Zayn does. Zayn has heard it all before, many, many times. "I don't want to be _that_ , you know, rebellious in the eyes of God when I have actual people looking up to me for guidance."

"Someone has a big ego," Zayn says, sing-song.

"My head wouldn't be this swollen if someone sucked it," Louis says, sullenly, and Zayn laughs.

"Sorry, babe," he says. "Can't help you out there. You're so far away and I'm so in a real relationship."

"Rude," Louis mutters. He kicks at some dirt in front of him and ends up stubbing his toe on a rock. Even more rude.

"But really," Zayn says, serious again. "If you claim that you don't think homosexuality is a sin –"

"You know I don't," Louis interrupts.

"You say you don't," Zayn agrees. "And your actions would support your claims. So it's not like you'd be jeopardizing your values."

"Stop eating so many textbooks up there in Charlottesville," Louis says, and then: "But what if I get found out?"

"Just don't get caught," Zayn says, like it's that simple.

"Zayn," says Louis. "Those are literally the famous last words of anyone in any tv show or movie or book that has ever existed or ever will exist on the face of this earth. Everyone gets caught. It literally always happens."

Zayn just laughs. "Then don't have sex," he says. "I mean, what other option do you have? Unless you plan to get married just to end your dry spell. It wouldn't be exactly out of character for your part of the world."

"I'm going to hang up on you," Louis says, but he tries to say it fondly, so Zayn knows that Louis at least appreciates that he's a friend.

"Love you too, buddy," says Zayn. "Knock 'em dead."

+++

Louis's next sermon is on the institution of sin. It's all he can do to keep from stressing the absurdity in the way 'sin' is determined and upheld by people in positions of religious power – whether they be religious leaders or well-respected members of religious community. It's hard also to refrain from questioning whether the cult of monitoring and restricting sin is really just an elaborate exercise in political control.

Louis's method has never been to express his own concerns and frustrations with the way Christian people interpret and execute God's will in his sermons, because he's fairly certain that's the quickest route to exposure, but he's feeling a little less concerned with playing by his own rules lately. 

He's not entirely sure why. Maybe it was Pastor David's death, or maybe it's just part and parcel of living in a place so intrinsically similar and yet so completely different to everything he knew in his childhood that's making him revert to the same gut urge to rebel against the doctrine he once swore to oppose. The doctrine that later bogged him down and restricted him, despite his original intentions in his decision to fake ordination and everything that came with it, to lead the same kind of life he once desperately wanted to reject and change.

Whatever it is, self-reflection isn't something he tends to embrace, and he's fairly certain he's done more of it in the past month than he's done in the past ten years. He'd like to stop picking at his own motivations and just let them happen. But if feeling less like he needs to compare his dedication to God and his faith to those around him, if feeling comfortable in his own skin, comes hand in hand with confronting the shortcomings in the way he's been approaching, well, _everything_ about his life, maybe it's worth it.

Harry, of course, emerges once everyone leaves. "Interesting sermon, Pastor," he says, squinting at Louis against the harsh light of the afternoon sun. "You're turning into a proper rabble-rouser."

"It'll be anarchy in the pews by the time I'm done with this congregation," Louis jokes, but Harry doesn't laugh. He just raises his eyebrows.

"There are easier ways to go about that than making them question everything about what they've been taught to know," Harry says. "For example, you could fuck me in the middle of Main Street."

"There isn't even an actual Main Street in this entire town," Louis says, rolling his eyes. He slaps lazily at a mosquito. "Anyway, _if_ I wanted them to truly question everything, I'd have to maintain enough legitimacy to encourage them to do it, wouldn't I? So no fucking in plain sight."

"What about fucking out of sight?" Harry asks. He runs a thumb under his lip, possibly because he's a demon from the second circle of hell. Or whatever. Louis hasn't given up on giving up trying to figure it out. 

"Ah," Louis says. "But you've revealed your true purpose to me. You'd want us to get found out and create more chaos."

"The idea has occurred to me," Harry admits. "But what's the fun in outright getting you kicked out of the town I've claimed? I prefer instigating niggling doubt and uncertainty in everyone around me, and having a reliable man of God to fuck away from the divine Light."

"I'm not a reliable man of God, though," Louis says. "You should've been seducing Liam."

"Aren't you, though?" Harry asks.

He leaves Louis with that question, and Louis leaves the church door unlocked that night. 

Harry doesn't show up, though. Louis doesn't know why he thought he would. He's never come twice in one day before.

+++

Louis is microwaving leftovers Niall had brought over when a memory, sharp and painful, washes over him: he's standing in the kitchen, staring at the fridge, trying to let his mom's words wash over him and not dig in deep like she means them to.

"Kissing that Bentley boy," his mother says. "Might as well be kissing the Devil. It'll corrode your soul just as much."

Except Louis is pretty sure that sucking Greg off – or Zayn, or any of the other people he's been with since that day fifteen years ago – didn't do a damned thing to hurt his immortal soul.

So:

"Fine," Louis says, next time Harry comes around. He's decided to actually take matters into his own hands. "No one ever talks to you anyway, so I'll fuck you."

"Wait," Harry says, faltering mid-step. He teeters, but doesn't fall over. "Really?"

"Don't take it personal," says Louis. "You're some kind of creature that sides more with the Devil than with God, so you obviously don't care about sinning, and I really miss sex, so."

"I care very much about sinning," Harry says, still staring at Louis like he's trying to read his very soul. Knowing Harry, he probably is. "I'm a big, big fan."

"Whichever," Louis says, and pushes the church door wide open.

This time, Harry follows him in.

Louis notices the change as soon as Harry enters the sanctuary. He walks like there's weight on him, like it's hard for him to move closer to the altar. For a split second, Louis gets the impression that Harry is struggling to maintain his very form, that Harry is bigger than the body he's wearing and aching to stretch out, but that moment passes with Harry's next step.

He's gorgeous in the dying sunlight streaming through the frankly grimy windows of the church, hands knotted tightly together. When Louis looks closer, he finds that Harry is massaging his cross tattoo with his thumb, biting his lip hard.

There's already sweat beading on his brow.

Louis has known lust in his time. He's known the pure carnal _need_ to learn someone's body with his tongue and his teeth, to fall to his knees and learn someone's cock as intimately as he knows the first book of Isaiah. The way his mouth goes dry when he sees Harry stretch against the invisible weight on his shoulders is nothing new.

The absolute degree of _urgency_ he feels, to plaster himself against Harry, to see how his hands and his mouth feel against Louis's body, is a revelation, however.

Louis has known for a while that he's attracted to Harry, demon from hell though he may be. He just hadn't realized the depths of his desires, apparently.

"Are you sure you want to blaspheme against God and all They hold holy?" Harry asks, but the way he says it makes it sound rhetorical, so Louis just steps up to him until he's nearly flush against Harry's chest and places a hand firmly on Harry's waist.

"Do you want to go into the back?" he asks, because that, of course, is where his air mattress is, but Harry just shakes his head.

"Fuck me here," Harry says. "In the house of God. Let Them feel the weight of Their neglect of Their people."

"I forgot," Louis says, dryly. "You get off on that kind of thing."

"Clearly, you do too," says Harry, and he cups a hand and presses it against the front of Louis's pants. Louis's cock is barely half-hard, but it stirs against Harry's touch.

"Fine," Louis says, and he pulls off his shirt, letting it fall over the back of a pew. He tugs at the fabric of the t-shirt under Harry's ubiquitous flannel. "Show me."

When Harry divests himself of his clothing, Louis can't help but gasp in shock. The religious tattoos Harry promised are all there, inked in abundance, dark against his pale flesh, but they look practically _raw_ , almost like they're straining away from Harry's body. When he touches one, an image of the Blessed Virgin on Harry's hip, it's _throbbingly_ hot, and raised against his skin.

"That looks painful," he says, and he digs his thumb into it.

Harry grins. His teeth look sharper than ever. "Told you I liked pain," he says, and that's all it takes. 

Louis pushes Harry forward, fingers fumbling at the button of his jeans as he walks him back towards the altar. If he takes control of all of this, if he's the one calling the shots, then there's no possible way he's ceding his own power. If Louis is in charge, he's not giving up everything he's been fighting to understand, risking losing the tenuous grip on his faith he's been clinging to to the one thing he's been trying to avoid his whole life: the knowledge that, despite everything, despite all his fuckups and half-assed attempts at doing _something_ good, he's sinned irrevocably. 

If he doesn't let Harry win, then everything Harry stands for – hell, and damnation, and worst of all, complete fucking ostracization – loses. 

By the time he's worked Harry's jeans down to his knees – and of _course_ Harry isn't wearing anything underneath them, he's a fucking _demon_ – they've crossed the short distance to the front of the sanctuary. 

Harry screams when his back brushes against the cross nailed to the pulpit, a shriek louder and higher than any noise Louis has heard before. There's the stench of burning flesh as Harry pushes harder against it, his cock swaying with the movement, instantly hard and flushed an angry red, dribbling precome from the tip. He doesn't move to get away from the pulpit, even though his screaming doesn't stop. No, he presses harder against it, raising his arms and letting his head fall forward in a gross facsimile of Jesus dying on the cross, staring at Louis until Louis falls to his knees and scrabbles his hands uselessly against Harry's thighs, trying to pull him away from the pulpit or maybe push him harder against it, and finally just dips forward to swallow Harry's cock down in one go. 

Harry's cock tastes more or less like every other cock Louis has tasted, though it's heavier on Louis's tongue than he's used to. His desperation is new, though – the way he writhes against the wood of the pulpit, twisting like it hurts. Like he can't get enough of it.

"That's right," Harry says, when he manages to stop screaming. His voice is raw and breathless. It echoes in the stillness of the room, and sounds somehow like there are many voices behind it. "On your knees, meant for devotion to God, debasing yourself for an emissary from Hell." He slowly lets a hand fall down from where he's been holding his arms out, to cup Louis's jaw in his hand and run a thumb over his cheek, pressing against to feel the hard line of his cock in Louis's mouth. "Release yourself from everything that is good and holy and blaspheme against the Holy God your heavenly Parent. _Fornicator_."

Harry's words make Louis slightly uncomfortable, but he can feel the way Harry is pulling away from and pressing against the pulpit in turn, shifting at the way the cross is singing into his flesh, so he puts his hands on Harry's hips to hold him steady against it and pulls back enough to tease at the length of Harry's cock, mouthing along the side and licking, lightly, over the top. He may not know a lot, ultimately, about God or the firmament of heaven or anything, but he does know how to suck cock. He _loves_ sucking cock. 

"I know you are," he says, raising an eyebrow at Harry when Harry struggles against the grip Louis has on his hips. "But what am I?"

" _Sodomite_ ," Harry breathes, tangling his fingers in Louis's hair to try and pull him back. "Filthy, irredeemable, _irresistible_."

"I'll suck the sin out of you," Louis whispers, and when Harry snorts a laugh, he pulls Harry's cock back into his mouth and, humming a little for the vibration of it, he presses the flat of his tongue rhythmically against the ridged vein on the underside as he takes Harry deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

Harry's come is hotter than any Louis has swallowed before, nearly burning his throat as he shoots off in Louis's mouth.

"How does it feel, Preacher?" Harry says, as Louis wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand. "To swallow the seed of a demon?"

"I've had better," Louis says, as Harry wraps a hand around his wrist and hauls him up so that they're face to face. 

"I doubt that," Harry says, and leans in, closer and closer. Louis is just starting to wonder if Harry is going to actually try and _kiss_ him when Harry darts to the side and licks a long, wet stripe up the side of Louis's neck. 

When Louis pulls away from Harry's touch, it's to guide him to the altar and turn him around.

The cross from the pulpit has burned into Harry's flesh, deep and raw and red. Louis touches the edge of the wound tentatively, and Harry hisses and presses back into his touch. 

"Looks painful," Louis says, lightly.

"Feels amazing," Harry counters, and spins around to face Louis and get a firm grip on his cock. 

Louis bites his lip at the feeling of Harry's fingers, rough and calloused pressed against the sensitive skin of his cock. "Have you ever considered," he says, letting his head loll back at the touch.

"Fucking you?" Harry asks. "Yes."

"That too," Louis says, but he shakes his head. "Letting our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into your heart?" He traces a cross directly over where Harry's heart should be – if, in fact, demons have them – and watches in amazement as his fingers leave a trial behind them, flushed pink. He does it again, and it's like the cross he traces starts to burn into Harry's skin. 

"Having fun?" Harry asks, sounding amused, so Louis grins up at him.

"Obviously," he says, and does it one more time. The mark is dark now, almost like a bruise of faith on Harry's pale chest. "I'd have more fun if I were fucking you, though."

"You'd willingly enter into a literal embodiment of sin?" Harry asks, interestedly. He runs a finger down Louis's cheek, almost fondly. "Didn't know you had it in you."

"Specifically, I'll have it in _you_ ," Louis says. He's still hard. He's always run his mouth a bit – he gets _paid_ to run his mouth, after all – but especially so when he's aroused. 

"Are you sure?" Harry asks, and when Louis nods, Harry nods back. "All right, then."

Louis prepared for this, thought about it long and hard for an entire night before deciding to actually go with it. He left the lube in his room, but he keeps a thick hand lotion behind the pulpit, and there's a condom in his back pocket.

When Louis works his fingers into Harry's hole, he discovers that Harry runs hotter inside than most people do, too; it's not just his jizz. As he works his second finger in, and then a third, he notices that Harry is mumbling something that's nearly too indistinct to make out. Eventually, as he rolls the condom on, gripping the base of his cock momentarily to relieve the pressure on it, he realizes it's the same words over and over: a quiet and insistent list of all of Louis's sins.

When he bends Harry over the altar and stands behind him, he counters Harry's quiet chant of _idolater, sodomite, fornicator, lust, envy, greed_. "II Kings 19:34," he says, looking out over the cross at the very front of the sanctuary even as he lines himself up and pushes slowly in. "I will protect and save this city for My sake, and for the sake of My servant."

" _Sinner_ ," Harry hisses. "Only the Devil will take you in when you die. Forsake God with your mind as you have with your heart. _Blasphemer_."

"Psalms 41:2," Louis chants, as he bottoms out, pressed flush against Harry's back. He can feel the ridged edges of the cross just burnt into Harry's skin against his chest, and he can't get enough of it. He wants to plaster himself against Harry's back and feel the symbol of his devotion and the tight heat of Harry's ass simultaneously _forever_. "Happy is he who is thoughtful of the wretched; in bad times may the Lord keep him from harm." He pulls out almost all the way, and slams forward again, pushing Harry into the wood of the altar, biting his lip against the feeling. Harry clenches around him, all slick heat. "56:4. When I am afraid, I trust in You, in God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I am not afraid."

"But you _are_ afraid," Harry says. "You fear for your soul, but it is already lost. Release your fears and _thrive_." He meets Louis in the middle, their hips snapping together. Louis tightens his grip on Harry's waist, tight enough to leave bruises, possibly. He leans down and licks along the welts lining the cross burnt into Harry's back. They taste metallic and bitter, and slightly of salt. Not burnt at all. "Desecrate God. Desecrate everything They stand for. What has God ever done for you? Blaspheme against Them with me."

"My soul," Louis says, "Is mine alone." He gasps against Harry's skin, close enough to his orgasm that it's almost impossible to drag the verses he knows so well from deep in his memory. "Mine and God's. The Lord is good to those who trust in Him." He's fairly certain that's from Lamentations, but he can't remember which book or which verse. "I trust in the Lord."

Harry says, "You trust in the pleasures of the flesh and that which you can actively seek to feel."

"I trust in what I know," says Louis. He's gasping between words now, hips rocking forward ceaselessly. His hands are sweating enough that it's hard to keep purchase on Harry's waist. "I know the way it feels to be inside you." It feels good, amazing even; Harry tight and hot around him, rocking back against Louis each time Louis rolls his hips. "I know the word of the Bible." He leans in enough to bite at the back of Harry's neck, hard, full-on tugging at Harry's skin with his teeth. "I know enough."

Harry falls silent at that, as Louis fucks into him once, twice, three more times, and then comes, vision whiting out around him as he does. He wonders if that means he's won.

When he draws back into awareness a moment later and pulls out of Harry, his softening dick hanging loose in the grossly humid air, Harry turns to him and drags his thumb across Louis's cheek one last time. "Then you know we will do this again," he says. "You know your desires for simple flesh pleasures are too strong to ignore." 

Louis doesn't say anything. He hasn’t won. His lust is too strong, and he will sin again. Harry isn't wrong. Harry didn't fail.

Harry grins, then pats Louis's cheek before going to collect his clothes. "This was nice. Thanks, Pastor."

Louis watches him from the altar as Harry leaves.

+++

Louis is quiet when he goes to bed that night. He doesn't know what he expected, but it wasn't that. When he kneels at the side of his mattress and crosses himself to pray, the words don't flow like they usually do. In the past, he's prayed to know God, to understand Him, to be shown that it's all worth it. To beg for forgiveness, or an apology for the past, or any kind of sign.

He doesn't feel that now. The air is just as thick and dusty and hot as it was when he moved into town. The crickets and cicadas are just as loud outside the window. He showered right after Harry left, all signs of sex swirling away in the drain – his skin doesn't hold the sign of the cross like Harry's does, that's for damn sure – and he smells like his own shampoo now. He thought about calling Zayn, but he doesn't know what he'd say. 

Louis had half-hoped, when Zayn told him Pastor David had died, that his mom would see the error of her ways and try to contact him. He knew she wouldn't but he'd still hoped. 

She hasn't, and by now he knows for certain that she's not going to. He wants to feel disappointed, but he doesn't feel much of anything.

He doesn’t feel much of anything at all.

If the people in town knew what he'd done, he'd be run out of town on a rail. Niall, as kind as he was when he'd taken Louis in years and years ago, even knowing that Louis had been kicked out of his home for sleeping with another boy, would definitely never speak to him again if he found out Louis had slept with _Harry Styles_ , hell-demon of questionable variety. Sophia might still speak to him, but she'd be the only one. He'd be ostracized against his own will and desires in much the same way that Harry deliberately seeks out. Zayn probably wouldn't care, but Zayn is hundreds of miles away with a life of his own.

He'd thought that if he'd maintained total control of when and where and how they fucked, he'd come out intact, but the thing is, Louis can't be sure that that's true anymore.

"What have I done?" Louis asks – to the room, to God, to anyone listening – but he's alone, so obviously no one answers.

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY so a couple notes:  
> 1\. harry is very VERY loosely based off of the offspring-of-fallen-angels-and-mortals and left-on-earth-after-the-Flood-to-lead-humans-astray interpretations of nephilim, except more overtly of Hell than that.  
> 2\. the church louis preaches in isn't southern baptist, but it isn't not southern baptist. it's less pentecostal than southern baptist, but it also isn't not a pentecostal church. WHATEVER. write what u know, right? it's bastardized appalachian christianity at its finest, which is really all that i know.  
> 3\. most of the offhand stories about life in eastern kentucky/carter county are 100% hearsay-true (like the dude who killed his parents and hid their bodies in the limestone mine for drug money) and the topic of gossip at many a family reunion wmyhaha. the actual town in this story could be any one of like five different towns in the area and is based a little bit on all of them.
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @ [dulosis](http://dulosis.tumblr.com). if you wanna reblog the original fic post, it's [here](http://dulosis.tumblr.com/post/94754406971/fic-pray-till-i-go-blind-1d-h-l)!
> 
> before you ask about a sequel - i DO NOT anticipate writing one. [this](http://dulosis.tumblr.com/post/126797589056/for-the-ask-meme-what-happens-next-in-the-church) is the closest I anticipate coming to doing so :).  
> please let me know what you thought!


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